[Pkg-octave-devel] Concurrent maintenance of the Octave packaging

[Sébastien Villemot]

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh at octave.org> writes:

> I know that the usual Debian practice is to strip the debian/
> directory if a source tarball contains it, but that's usually because
> there isn't very good communication between Debian and upstream. Now
> that we're actually moving towards keeping the tarball source with the
> Debian packaging, perhaps this can be an overall good move? This
> should ease the burden of packaging if it's shared between Octave and
> Debian developers.

Assuming that this workflow is desirable in terms of task sharing
between developers (which is not obvious to me), I don't see how we can
implement this in an elegant way.

For example, suppose that we have created the official Debian package
using the debian/ dir of the upstream tarball as you suggest, and that
later we need to change the packaging before a new upstream release
happens (there are many reasons why we may need to do so), then:

- either our package is of the "3.0 (native)" kind, and we need to
  create an artificial upstream number and an artificial upstream
  tarball containing the required changes;

- or our package is of the "3.0 (quilt)" and then dpkg-source erases the
  debian/ dir of the upstream tarball when uncompressing the source. So
  we have to provide another (possibly modified) version of upstream
  debian/ dir in the debian.tar.gz.

Both ways seem very clumsy to me.

Best,

-- 
Sébastien Villemot
Researcher in Economics at CEPREMAP & Debian Maintainer
http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
Phone: +33-1-40-77-49-90 - GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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